Greek Syntax & Propositional Logic In Philosophy, Math, CS & Beyond

Working in computer systems on the infra layer should be illegal if you don't comprehend Greek syntactical and propositional logic.

Learning Greek (even modern watered Greek for noobs) is essential for grasping the roots of many fundamental concepts in philosophy, math, and science. Take propositional logic, for instance. Ancient Greeks, with their communication protocol, laid the foundation for abstract thinking and logical reasoning in an era where most of the world was still eating from the floor, quite literally.

In Greek, the word "logos" encompasses not only logic but also meaning itself, reason, and discourse. Understanding the etymology and nuances of such Greek terms can deepen your comprehension of these concepts. For instance, "propositional" logic relates to "προτάσεις" a term the Greeks used to denote statements or assertions.

Moreover, Greek OGs like Plato and Aristotle made significant contributions to the philosophy of language and logic, shaping the way we think about truth, validity, and argumentation, even nowadays. So, while you might not need to be fluent in Greek, Ancient, or Modern, a grasp of its key terms and philosophical history can indeed illuminate your path in philosophy, math, computer science, and beyond.

There is a reason why Bill Gates was fascinated enough with Aristotele to ensure his top-shelf writings were kept private and only accessible to him. You can also see that spill over the Windows operating system (particularly W98 and older Vs) when you get a blue screen or black screen also known as Greek screen lol, cause you see a bunch of random Greek characters that make no sense, even to Greeks.

Modern computers partially think Greek, and there is a good computational reason for that. Take this group of words for example and see how they translate into Greek:

disease = νόσος (nosos)

hospital = νοσοκομείο (nosokomio)

nurse = νοσοκόμα (nosokoma)

You might say “It all looks Greek to me”, but for a computer, it makes absolute sense, and it helps limit computational resources while maintaining maximum efficiency, as the correlation between these words is not only a conceptual one but also a grammatical and syntactical, meaning the computer will spend less time and resources in searching all the possibilities across all domains to find or conclude to these relations.

What am I up to (BMIs part #1)

Now, enough with the never-ending Greek dive. Let’s shake our minds and I’ll explain what I am up to, how it occurred to me, and how I non-surprisingly ended up stumbling upon the usual philosophical suspects who have thought and processed everything we’re struggling with today thousands of years ago already. It’s just sometimes hard for us to believe everything they say in a literal way, as it often implies that A. we are stupid, and B. that God or a creator of this environment exists which leads to C. we are artificial or fake. Modern humans tend to avoid any reality that suggests the above.

As you might already know, I am on an active quest to switch my presence, and by extent contributions, from the web3 industry into the fascinating BMI industry (brain-machine-interfaces) for a plethora of good reasons.

First, after almost 8 years in blockchain, I have a 360 understanding of the industry, the hurdles, the regulatory trajectory, the underlying infra and real tech, and the unavoidable monopoly. Not even talking about the often disgusting greed that makes up 99% of the rapidly growing sector nowadays. That helped me realize that there is nothing more I can contribute to this industry at this rate, as it is already a closed loop with a fixated future that no matter how much “decentralization” they’re selling through media narratives, will end up on the opposite side of what people are taught to envision.

Blockchain is made for machines, even if it’s hard to grasp as a self-centered being who must justify everything, especially manmade tech, as something that has to benefit us personally, somehow. In the end, the true power of blockchain is the ability of machines to cultivate an essence of time, and for us being able to cultivate digital twins based on immutable records of our internet behavior.

On the other hand, we have Quantum Computing, Bioinformatics and Genetic Engineering, Brain-Machine or Brain-Computer interfaces, and soon-to-be Permanent Realities (PR), emerging from XR endeavors and their intersection with BMIs.

These industries might sound far-fetched for the untrained mind, but I assure you, they are just around the corner, and most importantly for me, they are at the stage, where blockchain was 10 years ago, meaning that there is room for contribution, ethical debate, and the trajectory has still multiple possibilities considering anyone can touch the steering wheel (for now).

Of course, having almost 0 scientific background, I had to get up to speed, so I started to study research papers, watch YouTube talks on the subject, connect with industry leaders and pioneers, and do market research in terms of startups, tech, talent, VCs, etc. in the space, and finally educate myself hands-on on some of the elements and verticals through which broader industries contribute to BMIs.

Being almost married to Coursera, I jumped into a cherry-picked group of classes that I thought would help me get a better grasp of BMIs both on a theoretical and practical level. I am happy to share my list:

*Depending on your transferable skills, you might need to get a course on molecular biology, organic chemistry, linear algebra, statistical tables, and well, the Greek language, lol.

Long story short, In multiple cases, I came across the importance of Greek syntax and philosophical principles especially when it comes to defining things, finding truths, and validating information.

As for why am I doing this, as explained above, I believe that there is infinite space for experimentation, pivoting, debate, and trajectory direction, both on the infra and tech/science side of things, as well as the business, regulatory, and ethical facades of this fascinating straight-outta-movie industry.

After talking with friends deep in the gov and regulatory sectors like Eva Kaili, Dimitrios Psarrakis, Yannis Mastrogeorgiou, and Dimitris Dimitriadis, among others, I realized that we don’t even have a clean regulatory picture of who is working on brain implants at the moment, who is funding them, and how is it regulated - if it is in any way (spoiler alert: it isn’t lol).

There are a bunch of narrative-intensive plays like Musk’s Neuralink, and the German-heavy Blackrock Neurotech, among hundreds of genuine startups in the space that know what they’re doing, but also those who focus solely on narrative and marketing. Separating noise from facts becomes easier once you get the basics and start to understand how this tech could work and how it could never work, and it usually all boils down to information theory, syntax, security & privacy, etc.

Before we dive deeper into BMIs, let’s take a side road where I explain how I believe information is being categorized in our brains based on a series of LSD experiences, and what I learned from the Ancient Greeks.

LSD intel exchange and categorization

Although I’d love to talk about my acid trips for days (maybe in another post), I will focus on information gathering, storage, zipping and archiving, and most importantly categorization and hierarchical relations.

During my experiences while under the influence of lysergic diethylamine, I had the opportunity to attract and subtract information from and to various domains, some beyond the physical and digital boundaries of information we normally perceive on an everyday basis. If you’ve tried LSD you know what I’m talking about, and if not, imagine that you’re a radio always tuned to a specific station (physical reality), and sometimes you can switch to an alt station (digital reality, social media, metaverse, etc.) When you consume LSD you get to listen to all the stations in a specific spectrum or range of frequencies, sometimes even simultaneously.

The types of information, even if they’re most of the times cloudy and nonsensical af, bear some “traits”, similar to NFTs 🤭, which help you better categorize them, even if you are not aware consciously of where the information came from and what it is about. Like trying to read an .exe file on a Mac. It won’t work out unless you wear a Windows simulator (which is the equivalent of what LSD does to your OS), but you can at least flag it and categorize it for future use.

My experience, and it seems to be a universal perception, reveals that there are 3 main distinguishable types of information that can be picked up by the organic processor (brain) and be worked towards something. So, don’t take anything you’re about to read literally, but try to think of it as logical practices to understand the relation, category, and hierarchy of information inside our brains:

Green flagged information: this type of information occupies most of our intel carrying slots, and it is temporal, short-term, and one could say non-essential or non-important information. For instance, an ice cream brand, or a paper straw. A manmade wall. A mortgage. A police car. What makes this information Green is that it can be denied at any moment and it wouldn’t affect the bigger movement or life itself. Eg. if you forget about that ice cream or the cops, life won’t get into a threatening trajectory, no matter how important you might perceive some of these info pieces are in the short run.

Yellow flagged information: this type of information is hierarchically more important than Green, and it directly affects and influences Green information packages, without being influenced by Green information. Fire would be the perfect example of Yellow information. Any green information combined with fire, may it be paper, cars, walls, humans, or animals, will tend to become carbon sooner or later, while fire will remain fire. It is also more important than Green information because if you forget about fire, then the chances for a trajectory that leads to devastating futures rise like crazy, but it’s still not at the top of information classes.

Red flagged information: the top, or at least, what our brain perceives as the most important information are Red info packs. These packs are always occupying the exact same space in our intel slots, and there are never more or less across beings, while Green and Yellow info are liquid from person to person. For example, if all our slots of info are 10. Then 1, not less than 1, and only 1, is Red. Then 2-4 are Yellow, and the rest are Green depending on how many Yellow. A typical human would look like 1R-3Y-6G. Red information is something like the ROM of who we are. They contain information related to your species, how you walk, how you breathe, how your heart beats etc. Stuff so important that it cannot be in your discretion to influence, but it feels sort of autonomous and automatic.

I have attempted to recreate alt versions of selves with eg. only green only yellow or only red or mix the balance in different ways to see what happens and it never works out. The information is already pre-distributed perfectly. Eg. When I was immature, I thought that if Red is rare and the best type of info, creating a unit with only Red info would mean he would be like Superman or something. Instead, the subject looked like Magikarp out of the water. That was because it was absolutely sure that it had to walk and breathe, but also swim and take water in, but also fly, and flop its wings, all at the same time, simultaneously, causing awkward paralysis. Red information is distributed only once per unit for a good reason.

Again, don’t take the above literally, but rather try to think of the relation between different types of information our brain has access to.

The Greek syntactical parallelism

I discussed this idea with my good friend Andronikos Koulis who has a background in linguistic psychology, philosophy, and political history, and who helped me better phrase the types of information, in accordance with Aristotelian or Platonic principles for communication.

You can switch Green with Γνώμη (Opinion or Proposition), Yellow with Γνώση (Gnosis or Knowledge), and Red with Πίστη (Faith or Belief).

In this case, your opinions are short-term and non-important, meaning that they can change or be denied at any moment. An opinion is gossiping, or speculating about the next bull market.

Gnosis represents established knowledge based on experience and accumulated opinions and mistakes that compound into solid truths. That could be for example the fact that you know when you wake up you will go to the bathroom. It’s not an opinion and you don’t debate with yourself before you fall asleep thinking “Should I go to the bathroom tomorrow”? No. It’s fixed. Not forever, but it’s long—term.

Finally, your faith and belief are hierarchically the top—shelf category of information that can alter, and influence the previous two even if defying logic is at play. Faith comes both as true and false beliefs and both will have the same effect because what matters is the type of information and not its validity. For example, a religious fanatic who believes he will go to heaven if he blows up taking 100 people with him, might be delusional to common logic, but in his head, since it’s not an opinion, and it’s not just knowledge but occupies faith slots, it is the subject’s sole reality.

Usually, false faith reveals its corrosion sooner or later. Eg. people who believe in money, eventually realize that money is not important. People who believe in a specific personified God and not in the notion of the creator, eventually realize that this specific figure doesn’t exist, etc. True faith is undeniable, and once you tap into it, you can never erase it, although it is extremely rare, and it doesn’t occur, you are rather tuned in a way to understand what has been already there, even before you. It is now here that you think about it, and it will be when you will not.

BMIs part #2

In this context, you can analogize the importance of categorizing and understanding informational hierarchy, way before we start implanting chips inside our brains 🤖🧠.

This is not just a regulatory, technical, or ethical concern, but it affects the preservational aspect of mankind as we know it.

In short, the reason I boldly label Neuralink and other similar attempts a narrative-intensive scam is because not only they haven’t solved that hierarchical part, but they haven’t even thought of it, being naive and greedy af. You could simply inject information into the brain in the form of signals and action potential or spikes, or even stimulate the brain in ways that control Sodium/Potassium equilibrium in the brain to generate artificial liquidity of hormones and other stimulants. I mean you could, if you’re a money maker, but you CAN’T if you really wanna interact with the brain in a pragmatic way.

An analogical example:

Imagine that you have a BMI installed and you want to install a skillware (this will make more sense in the near future), eg. learn the English language or Karate in a matter of minutes or even seconds. It’s one thing to be able to translate the actual intel into mechanical signals, into electricity, into chemistry, and vice versa, and a completely different thing, to know what type of information you’re installing into the brain, and which hierarchical slot it should be occupying.

If we don’t do this the correct delicate way the brain and Ancients dictated, then eg. if you install the English language into Green or Opinion slots, then the user might think he knows English, but he won’t really know it. The same if you install Karate for example, not in the appropriate channels, and instead install it with a hierarchy of faith or belief, then the user might start beating the shit out of people on the street for no reason because he doesn’t just know Karate, but he believes, and breathes Karate.

This was originally posted via my Emerging Realities newsletter. Subscribe for free for more stories of this nature here.

Outro

For that reason, I am trying to figure out how to combine all the different puzzle pieces to ensure we don’t treat BMIs as another fancy tech, but we are aware of the long-term implications of intel displacement, and wrong categorization and hierarchy of information. We should be aware of science and tech, sure, but there are things beyond these aspects, that you can only learn if you look deeper than books and internet pages. You have to look beyond logic, philosophy, and the idea of God, and be prepared to encounter truths and faiths that might alter your entire being. Otherwise, it clearly smells like yet another cash grab with greed being the top driving force of “innovation”.

Happy to elaborate further, discuss, and debate on the subject. Hit me on socials and I will most likely answer asap.

Till next time, I wish you wake up every day with a passion for life and not fake consistency for money or views or muscles and glutes that will never be used outside Instagram. 🥰

I love you.

Ross Peili

Also published here.